


Sharp

by Clementine19



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Not beta'd we die like men, anon prompts, very mild clicker gore i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:08:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26402443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementine19/pseuds/Clementine19
Summary: For this lovely anon"...like a slow motion, love at first sight kind of thing?"Shifts between omniscent Joel context and reader's perspective otherwise.Subject to updates!
Relationships: Joel (The Last of Us)/Reader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	Sharp

— _Joel_ —

Joel scrubs his hands down his face, over his beard, gripping his own neck. He breathes deep before pushing into the meeting room, exhausted despite a solid night’s rest in his own house in Jackson, in his own bed. He hated speaking in front of groups. He begged Tommy to make this sort of shit his problem, last night, always, a thousand times, but his brother had tucked armory keys into his hand and waved him off, retreating with his arm around Maria.

It wasn’t the teaching he minded, it was the way the younger patrol group looked to him unblinkingly, the terror and weight of saying the wrong thing they’d remember forever evoking the way it felt to swear in front of Sarah. Ellie had started to show up again recently after a period of skipping the opportunity to hear Joel say words he might not believe, slipping in the back of the room once it was crowded.

Joel’s gaze was down as he entered, not wanting to register if she’d be there again, arms crossed, defiant small face casting derision on everyone who hadn’t pulled him off of rebar before.

Who he hadn’t made a horrible choice for.

All that aside, it was the day for bow practice for nearly _everyone_ who patrolled. Joel had unstuck three unbroken, _unretrieved_ arrows from next to a doorframe along the route last week with a practical growl of annoyance. He’d erred on the side of over-arming the younger group, trusting the more seasoned to actually conserve some. The fungal, sticky spatter on the door flapping behind exhibit A, though, clicker on the threshold of the building, told him they were too reliant on a loaded, working shotgun.

Joel holds up the three arrows at one side of the room, refusing to go where the semicircle of Jackson residents insinuated he should be, exposed at the center of them.

— _You—_

You perch on a desk in the corner, Ev and Ben bickering about a girl they’d both sighted last night after Maria had cleared and welcomed them, pointing them to the Tipsy Bison. Bow over your shoulder, you blink sleepiness away and appraise the apparently comfortable people around you. Their clothes are in good repair and mild small talk ruffles about. One of the younger, more sleep-deprived looking ones is even doodling on a table. You snort, chastened by twenty-five years of stumbling into communities that felt full of ease until you held back the branches and saw the rotting tree’s core.

You don’t notice another arrival until he starts speaking and people hush in a ripple that lasts for only a moment. Which, to their credit, something hushed you up about that voice belonging to the agitated-looking man holding up three relatively unbent arrows. His profile made you gawk before you pulled your posture upright, glancing around at the residents for a reaction. His voice was sonorous in the small space, and it made you want to close your eyes, content to listen.

“Alright, I’m not going to ask who did this. I’m definitely not congratulating whoever sprayed it on the door after three full drawbacks _already_ failed. What we are doin’, is fixin’ this. Grab your bow, follow me up to the ridge—” he cuts off, catching like the moment an unseen fly audibly speeds past a person’s head, interrupting them without the courtesy of perceptibility.

His eyes land on yours for a second, hardness there as he notes your group gravitating to the corner, casual stances indicating command but expressions uncertain and shifting frequently as you appraise your new surroundings and acquaintances. Your mouth parts, and you look down and hop off of the desk you’d been sitting on, filing in with the rest.

“Who’s that?” you lean your head towards another woman, rifle and bow across her back.

She gives a mirthless one-sided smile, expression looking tired.

“Joel Miller,” her voice contains an eyeroll, and she strides ahead to catch up with an older group.

You see broad shoulders barreling ahead of the group, hands shoved into his pockets.

One of the teenagers trots up to him as they begin to climb the hill to the ridge, quiver looking comically big between narrow shoulders.

“So, how far can these go?” she queries, gesturing towards the ridge and her freshly acquired bow.

You see his profile again as he smiles, lines by his eyes not unattractive atop his cheekbones.

“Targets aren’t down there. We’re not going to lose all these arrows.”

She scrunches her nose and falls back to her companions, murmuring her report out of his earshot.

— _Joel_ —

“Remember the hunter I got through the ear?” Ellie’s voice interrupts his stride.

Joel’s eyes widen, but he accepts the familiarity. The clenching that settled into his diaphragm lately recedes a bit. He lets warmth come to his eyes and he nods, a smile. Ellie had pinned the kid to a wall with her shot and he’d finished the job with a shotgun before he could react. Ellie punches him in the shoulder in the present with a smile in reply. She may be livid with him, but they can talk when they’re here, when they have to.

“Can you help corral some of them?” Joel jerks his head at the younger group.

Ellie nods, adjusting her bow in the sticky heat. Joel pushes a hand over his forehead, starting to sweat from the hike. They kept a few targets out this way, sheltered from the kind of echo potential that brought nasty surprises if you didn’t shoot an assault rifle or hold a concert.

She runs off, waving broadly to them, followed closely by Jesse. They’re a gregarious pair, and the younger kids trace their steps.

— _You—_

“Mornin’, then,” Joel starts with your group of newcomers. “How comfortable are y’all?”

You watch his face intently, more grey than you’d thought from afar, build more imposing this close.

Scraggly Ev and Ben, your idiot twin traveling companions are nearly his height and half his age. They step forward and draw, firing four arrows in clean unison into a tree across the path. His eyelashes are dark over something close to hazel, you observe. Joel nods, content with their speed, head ticking over to Ellie’s group as they raise their voices with the activity.

“Ellie!” he calls, gesturing in irritation at the valley around him.

“Hey! Hey!” she stage hisses, finger to her mouth, rolling her eyes in a reflection of his annoyance. There _were_ still herds, and they were far too close to the clicker corpse he’d discovered last week. The kids hush, and he catches Jesse looking at her longingly, something common enough to ignore it.

Turning back to the newcomers, he nods at you, indicating that you’re next.

“You first, cowboy,” you tilt your head to the side, narrowing your eyes. You’d already proven you didn’t have any bites to their town leader; why should they know anything about what you can do? Your wrapped hand rests on the handle of the bow, arrow strung. You’ve been stroking the rubbery feathers with a _thhhhwip_ sound, possibly the vague buzzing Joel’s been trying to find the source of for half the morning.

“Aw c’mon, they’ve been nothing but nice,” one of the twins protests.

The other one rolls his eyes, throwing his hands up like this has been a frequent confrontational pattern for you.

Joel glances up for a second, flicking his revolver’s barrel into his palm like it’s a habit, but you see him check the loadout to specifically to for it to be unconscious.

The group of you snap to attention, focusing on a familiar clucking rattle from down the path. You pull your bowstring and brush your face with it as you draw back hard.

Joel straightens and fires a muffled round at the crevice in its fungal plates, blinking without flinching as a perfectly aimed arrow arcs into the same slit. The clicker freezes before spasming to the ground, limbs unnaturally stiff, none of the usual thrashing to accompany the throaty death rasp it gargles out. Ev and Ben run forward to get a better look, leaving you with just the click of the hammer on Joel’s pistol clicking back as he chambers another round smoothly.

Your fingers are still unfurling from releasing the string when you’re aware of his eyes on you. The reverberation of the bowstring is still most of what you hear, but your eyes slide to him as you lower your bow to confirm that it’s not moving, tension draining out of your shoulders as you allow yourself your first real breath in several heartbeats. Your ears ring slightly with how close he’d fired.

Joel’s body faces you and you square your shoulders to his, returning his gaze. His expression is trying to rearrange itself, but his mouth is parted. Man with aim like that doesn’t get winded dropping a clicker from fifty feet away. You confirm that his eyes are hazel as impartially as you can, but you glance over him once and hope it looks like you’re looking at the ground. Where had gesturing to your perfect headshot to dismiss him fled to? It seemed like the point when you aimed your bow, but when your shots struck together you’d just widened your eyes on his extended forearms.

Joel glances between you and the bow, face looking the way people who stood up too fast did. His eyes are moving quickly but only over your face

He shakes his head, one little jolt, swallowing and looking away.

“Welcome to Jackson,” he half-raises a hand in something that wanted to be a farewell gesture, and you watch him walk off aimlessly with that hand on the back of his neck, seeing the sharp turn on his heel when he identifies Ellie as a reasonable destination and sidles over.

“What?” you snap at Ev through a smile, who’s returned to your side with their unbroken arrows safely back in their possession.

Ev and Ben glance in each other’s direction and make faces at each other.

— _Joel_ —

Joel narrows his eyes at his brother, half a mind to knock his barstool out from under him, but the ingrained sibling quarrel impulse goes out of him. He sees Tommy as he is now, close to Maria whenever possible, smiling easily, hope rewarded.

He silently drops the armory keys on the counter next to him, taking a seat and sighing.

“Thought I made clear those are yours,” Tommy comments, signaling for another round.

“Thought I made clear _I hate_ doing that,” Joel grits, huffily accepting the beer slid down the counter in one hand.

“No, you don’t. You’re just shy of people in hordes,” he replies the same way he has for weeks. He sounds like the older brother, and Joel winces at it.

“Tommy, I gotta tell you somethin’,” he starts, his arm going limp after flapping against Tommy’s chest a few times to redirect his attention.

“Put another way—” Tommy’s loud voice tramples over his statement and recedes into the comforting din of the bar around him.

— _You—_

You’re comfortably sloshed in a booth in the corner of the bar, Ev and Ben chattering away with two Jackson patrollers sharing a big bucket of beer with the three of you. You’d met on the way back from the ridge and had spent the first half of your first bottle getting them to say their names again—they’d introduced themselves seconds after Joel retreated and you weren’t particularly listening.

Leg up on the booth with your arm draped around it, you laugh at a joke you’d heard Ben use to bond with people for years over, hazy and fighting the encroaching trust you were starting to feel.

You sip yours, scanning the room like you’d really be much good at identifying a threat in your state and jump, sucking in liquid and cringing as the beer foams close to your nasal passages. You press your mouth closed to re-start your breathing.

Joel’s perched at the bar, mouth on the rim of his beer and eyes wide as they lock with yours. The blond man next to him is gesturing emphatically while he’s being completely disregarded. You recognize Maria next to him from the town hall earlier in the day, kind but insistent that everyone has to be checked for bites. She wasn’t wrong, but you still bristled at it and stayed defensive through the patrol.

Joel smiles for the first time you’ve seen, eyes down as he takes another long draw of his beer, never holding a look for long.

In the periphery, Tommy swivels his head from Joel to you, does simple math, and shrugs, turning back to Maria and the rest of the group he’d been with before his brother arrived.

Joel sighs, eyes shimmering like they’re moving in quick darts over sections of your face as before, taking in each feature and moving to the next before he can properly process the former, cycle of study repeating without his conscious control.

Tipsily deciding you should talk about your symmetrical abilities, or maybe that it was a good enough excuse to go over there, you shoo Ev and Ben out of the booth so you can wriggle past, exchanging gracious thanks with your new acquaintances and trying to measure your steps.

Joel doesn’t move his eyes from you as you stride towards him, fingers playing at the rim of your bottle uncertainly. He’s either not making a secret of taking in every part of you, has absolutely no pokerface, or something else you’d forgotten how to name. Whatever seemed severe or stormy before was thawing, and you needed to chip off more of it.

“Explain surviving to survivors often, stranger?” you start, a little bashful of appending nicknames to every interaction so far.

“Joel,” he evades but doesn’t retort, extending his hand. You’re slightly above him like this, and he tips his chin up like he’s going to bare his neck to you. His eyes follow everything you do to the extreme exclusion of everything around him. Tommy thumps into his back at one point, arms waving mid-story and finding the unresponsive, solid muscle too incurious to even spur a reflexive “quit it.”

“I’d heard,” you offer, taking his hand and finding it warm, easy to run your palm against. He’s holding your gaze more steadily now, less excursions away to encode the rest of you. His eyes stay frankly fixed to you, and you indulge it with matched intensity.

You give him your name and fold a leg under you on the barstool next to him, settling with an elbow on the bar.

“Just some of the less experienced ones,” he confesses in answer to your first question, but you’re watching how the light falls over his features in below the frequently-jumpy electric string lights crisscrossing the bar. Joel spins his beer from its base, watching it circle before halting it against his palm, over and over. He looks back up, thoughtfully taking his time with whatever he was going to ask. 

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me over at [ the ol' tumbs](https://joelmillerthirstqz.tumblr.com/)


End file.
